Van Halen – Fair Warning (1981) (MFSL SACD Remaster 2025) [UDSACD 2246] mp3+flac+Hi-Res (DSD64)

Van Halen Taps into a mean streak on Fair Warning: The darkest and fiercest album of the band’s career the double-platinum 1981 record sounds unrelenting on Mobile Fidelity’s numbered-edition Hybrid SACD: the audiophile reissue plays with stunning dynamics. The song titles on Van Halen’s aptly titled Fair Warning don’t lie. The likes of “Unchained,” “Mean Street,” “Push Comes to Shove,” “One Foot Out the Door,” and more indicate the mood the band channels on its double-platinum 1981 record — the nastiest, darkest, and fiercest album of the group’s storied career.

Taking a more controlled approach in the studio and still completing everything in less than two weeks, Van Halen and producer Ted Templeman relied on studio amplifiers to direct the sound. Further diverging from the live-on-the-floor approach of its earlier albums, the ensemble also employed overdubs to great effect.

Tough, aggressive, stark: Fair Warning comes on like a series of bare-knuckled punches to the solar plexus and boasts lyrical narratives to match. Though not a concept record, the concise album revolves around themes of roughing it on the streets and struggling to survive amid dim prospects. The characters and situations populating Fair Warning reflect hardscrabble existence, last-chance desperation, and underlying danger. Witness the crazies, poor folks, and hunters of “Mean Street”; the former prom queen turned pornographic actress on “Dirty Movies”; the menace and vice of “Sinners Swing!”; the streetwise hustle of “Unchained”; the isolation and alienation of “Push Comes to Shove”; the desire for escape on “One Foot Out the Door”: A carefree California beach party Fair Warning is not.

Artist: Van Halen
Album: Fair Warning
Year: 1981 (SACD remaster 2025)
Label: Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab
Style: Classic Rock, Hard Rock
Format: mp3/320, flac (tracks, 44.1kHz/16bit), DSD64 (tracks, dsf)

Tracklist
01 Mean Street 5:04
02 “Dirty Movies” 4:07
03 Sinner’s Swing! 3:09
04 Hear About It Later 4:33
05 Unchained 3:29
06 Push Comes To Shove 3:48
07 So This Is Love? 3:06
08 Sunday Afternoon In The Park 1:57
09 One Foot Out The Door 2:02

turbo320

turboflac44.1k16b

Hi-res. DSD64